


Kodachrome

by SegaBarrett



Category: Bates Motel (2013)
Genre: Backstory, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 16:46:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10994922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Alex and Theresa over the years.





	Kodachrome

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Bates Motel and I make no money from this.
> 
> A/N: Title from the Paul Simon song ^_^

The first thing Alex Romero could remember thinking about his mother was that she was beautiful.

He assumed that most boys felt that way, but most of those boys didn’t have Theresa Reyes as a mother.

She had moved to America when she was ten, speaking no English and having no connections. She had wound up in foster care and earned money from the age of fourteen, with a paper route first and then as a model.

He could understand how she had succeeded in the business. She had long black hair and eyes that seemed to twinkle whenever she smiled.

That wasn’t very often. 

Maybe she had smiled long ago, long before she had met Alex’s father. Back when the world seemed like a beautiful place to be, an adventure.

When Alex was fifteen, he thought the world could be like that.

That was when he realized how wrong he was.

***

There was a certain importance to being the Sheriff’s son, though Alex wasn’t really sure why. After all, the town was run on the drug trade; it was one of those things that Alex had always just known, from it being whispered in the halls when he was barely able to see over his desk or, maybe, from just knowing it through osmosis. 

If you were the Sheriff’s son, the normal rules didn’t apply to you. You didn’t need to do your homework on time, and you didn’t need to be in dress code.

But if you took advantage of all of those perks, you would be looked at as an Other.

And Alex did not want that.

So he kept it in his back pocket, for a rainy day. Maybe one day, it would pay to be the Sheriff’s son. 

But he didn’t want it to be today.

***

“Alex, honey…” Theresa was looking at her son over her shoulder, smiling as she rolled her shoulders forward. “How do I look?”

Alex smiled too, awash in her glow.

When she was happy, it seemed as if the world was happy too. 

“You look great, Mom. What’s the occasion?”

“I’m going out to see some very important people, Alex. I think I’m finally going to fit in. Maybe this small town isn’t so bad after all.” She let out a tiny little laugh, kicking her feet off into a twirl, holding her hands up as if she was a ballerina. 

“What kind of very important people?” Alex asked. “Everyone I’ve met here has just been… boring. Or depressing.”

“You’re such a cynic. I’m going to dinner with the Shelbys. They’re a nice couple, and they have the most adorable little boy. He can’t be more than three or four. Oh, sometimes I wish…” She paused, looking over at the window, before looking back at Alex and letting out a chuckle. “Oh, nothing. I’d better make sure I put my earrings on. I wouldn’t want them to think I’m a space cadet.”

She ran back into her room and re-emerged with a pair of emerald earrings in her hands. 

“These are beautiful, aren’t they? I’ve always loved emeralds… You ought to drop some hints to your father that he needs to get me some more of these. Won’t you do that for me, Alex? I can’t really go ask him myself.” She laughed nervously, as if that would change the thought that went through Alex’s mind – that she would not ask him to his face because she was terrified of him.

Alex forced a smile and nodded.

“I’ll drop some hints, Mom. I promise.”

Sometimes he wondered why he did not call her Mama, the way he sometimes feels a proper Cuban son should. 

But there are not many here in White Pine Bay.

There are not any here in White Pine Bay.

A well-named place, he mused. Everyone was as white as snow, and seemed to think they were as pure as it.

It didn’t take long to see that that purity was tainted. 

But for now, he agreed that the emeralds were the most beautiful he had ever seen.

***

It was late when his mother returned, and Alex was still awake in his room. He hadn’t noticed until now just how many tiny jagged edges were pointing down from the sky, looking at him. Judging him.

He ran downstairs at the sound of the key turning in the door. 

He stared at her, standing in the door, her dress tied up in her hands as if she had been wringing it.

“Alex, honey.” Her words were slurred, quiet. “Can you… Can you…?”

“What do you need, Mom? I’m here.” 

“Just… I need water, okay? Just water.”

He rushed into the kitchen and returned with a tall glass filled with water, handing it to her as his eyes widened in concern. 

She tipped back the glass, swallowing heavily, her eyes darting around as she tried to catch her breath.

“Alex. Alex, baby. Sometimes I hate them.”

“Who?”

“Everyone.”

***

Alex scratched at the back of his neck, cringing as the sweat pooled there. Of course, White Pine Bay High School hadn’t thought fit to buy a central air system for the school. Only one room was air conditioned, and it was the in-school suspension room. Ironic.

His eyes darted around the class, catching a glimpse of Maggie Summers scratching something into her desk with a pen-knife. Rebecca Hamilton sat to the other side of him, shoulders thrown back and staring openly at the clock.

His classmates. His town. His future. He would grow old here, and one day he would become one of them, no doubt. 

He could hardly wait to feel his life disappear.

“Alex Romero.” He lifted his eyes to look directly at the teacher, and he was sure that he saw the man flinch.

He could be dangerous. He knew that part already.

And maybe, a little bit, he was ready to revel in it.

***

Theresa loved the long strand of pearls that she kept by her bedside. Alex would always watch her nervously running her hands over them, as if she had to keep touching them to make sure that they were still there.

“Mom,” Alex told her, watching her run the pearls in between her fingers. “I’m worried about you.”

“Worried about me?” she asked, letting out a trill of a laugh and leaning back in bed. “I’m fine, honey. Just tired, okay?”

“He’s gone again. Where’d he go this time?” Alex tried to keep the snarl out of his voice, but he found that he wasn’t doing a very good job of it. 

Theresa shrugged.

“I don’t know. I don’t keep track of him. What have you been doing, Alex? Are you doing well in school? Are you keeping with a good crowd? I feel like you don’t really tell me anything, anymore.”

“There’s not really anything to tell, Mom.” He didn’t want to talk about the fact that he didn’t have any friends – not in this fake crowd where everyone was smiling and plastic but it was obvious that corruption was running rampant under the surface, poison in the water and tremors under the Earth one inch away from bursting out.

“You’d tell me if there was?”

Alex let out a long sigh. He’d long since realized that some days, his mother could go up the stairs one person and come down another person. There was a half of Theresa that he knew that he could talk to, but when she got into that state… That other state, that other her…

Well, there was no talking to her then. And best not to pick it up now, in case she fixed back on it later. It just wasn’t worth it. Better to be the steadfast supporter, the always-stoic one.

“Of course I’d tell you, Mom. But there really isn’t anything going on.” He nimbly sat down next to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “How about you, though? How are you doing?”

She smiled, then turned away, as if Alex wouldn’t know she was turning her head to hide the tears in her eyes. She was always so sad.

He would have to be the one who fixed things for her; it wasn’t as if anyone else was going to do it.

But sometimes it hurt. This day was one of the days when it hurt.

***

Alex was nineteen years old when they came and took his father to prison. The elder Romero didn’t say a word, simply walked away with them with a look on his face that clearly indicated he was telling anyone in authority they could go fuck themselves.

On the stand, he pled guilty, and Theresa sobbed in the stands.

Alex looked at him, hands clasped in front of his lap, and didn’t feel a single thing.

It was as if he was watching a sparrow eat a worm, or less. At least the worm didn’t toxify every piece of skin it pressed against.

***

If his mother had been miserable married to his father, she was downright despondent now that he was behind bars.  
She did not go to visit him, not after the first week. 

Instead, she sat by the window and looked out at the dark sky. Alex would sit next to her and gave up as well, wondering what she saw. Did she imagine herself back in Cuba, looking at the sea? Or did she imagine herself somewhere else entirely, some peaceful place she had never mentioned to him because it hadn’t existed in so long?

Alex saw her falling apart, piece by piece, like a car that the owner can’t afford to have fixed – first one part goes, then the next, then eventually it is considered totaled.

Alex did not want to believe that Theresa was totaled, but her vacant eyes told a different story.

He wished that he could be enough for her to come back to him. He wanted to shake her sometimes, to remind her that his father wasn’t worth wasting away over. That she could find someone else, someone good, that Alex would even help her and would never stand in her way.  
That he loved her.

But it would never be enough.

***

It was raining the day that he buried her. She was unable to be buried in a Catholic cemetery; suicides weren’t allowed.

Theresa had never been allowed to call anywhere home for long.

Alex went back to his empty house and sat in her favorite chair, a big pink one she had loved to read in. She had read books that Alex had told her were too depressing; but there was something about them that she couldn’t seem to stay away from.

There was one of them sitting by the chair on a small desk, a marker inside it. 

It was _In the Time of the Butterflies_. She had only made it a quarter of the way through.


End file.
